MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
No bio...
User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
12d ago
Agreed - the story here is that Christian right has, consistently with the broader "pro-life" memeplex, always been sincere in their opposition to eugenics, and the links between Darwin and Margaret Sanger (and the early C20 Progressive memeplex more broadly) and support for eugenics are absolutely real - in the modern world where "eugenics bad" is near-universally accepted, this creates an open goal for the religious right which they are happy to kick the ball through at every opportunity.
There are not many cases where the religious right was on the right side of history by the woke left's own standards in living memory, but this is legitimately one of them.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
heredi Jews, the Amish, Mennonites, and other similar groups.
Two very different models. The Haredim have a social model based on parasitism (both in Israel and the US) and the main source of income in Haredi communities is fiscal transfers. The Mennonites and Amish (which are descended from the same Swiss Anabaptist sect) are probably slightly fiscally negative at the margin but social model values economic self-sufficiency at the community level.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9d ago
Bears might not attack you. Bears are more afraid of you than you are of them!
Bears seem to be one of the very few kinds of animal where this is not true. When I was hiking in Sequoia/King's Canyon National Park, the bears did not seem to be avoiding me, but I was definitely avoiding them. Both a sensible bear and a sensible human will run away if the other makes a credible threat display, but bears will ignore people who are not particularly threatening.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9d ago
Very little of Europe - probably just Berlin, which is the crunchiest city in Continental Europe, driven by some combination of the west Germans who moved there during the Cold War to dodge the draft and the hippies who moved there to take advantage of cheap rents immediately after the Wall came down.
In formerly-Catholic Europe (I have personal experience with France, Spain, Italy and Poland) vegetarianism is seen as a weird Anglosphere perversion (veganism even more so) and the only decent vegetarian food is traditional cuisine-of-the-poor which typically uses cheese as the main protein. A fond memory of my trip to Naples was seeing a solo American female who appeared to be EPLing being shown the door after bothering the only English-speaking waiter about her "intolerances" and being told that there were only three vegetarian items on the menu (two of which were the margherita pizza and the arrabbiata pasta) and she could take or leave them.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
12d ago
Apart from anti-Civil Rights political violence in the south, of which there was a lot (the rioters were right-wing, but would have been registered Democrats), the Hardhat riots are the most obvious example of right-wing political violence in the time period you are looking at. Over 100 people, including 7 cops, were hospitalised. Given the partisan politics of NYC construction unions, you can call it a Democratic riot on a technicality (the ringleaders were construction union officers who were registered Democrats, and they were protesting the decision of liberal Republican mayor James Lindsay to fly a flag at half-mast after the Kent State shootings), the rioters were condemned by national Democratic leaders and praised by the Nixon administration.
Opposition to forced bussing was mostly peaceful, but anti-bussing riots in Louisville in 1975 involved police cars being torched and widespread use of tear gas, so I assume there were multiple injuries. Again, given the partisan politics of the white South, the rioters were probably registered Democrats.
But my google-fu is telling me that
- The vast majority of political violence in the US during this period was race-related.
- After 1963 or so, the vast majority of the race-related violence is black urban riots.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
The big difference between British and American Jews is religion. Per Wikipedia, 46% of American Jews are synagogue members, but only 22% of the 46% are Orthodox. 56% of British Jews are synagogue members, and 69% of the 56% are some flavour of Orthodox. (The difference appears to be even higher based on survey data, but I think the synagogue membership numbers are more reliable because maintaining synagogue membership is a costly signal).
British secular (and Reform, although there are not enough regular synagogue-going Reform Jews in the UK to matter) Jews are as left-wing as American ones - the most significant secular Jewish family in the UK at the moment is probably the Milibands, where Ralph was a WW2-era Polish Jewish refugee who became a famous communist academic, and his sons David and Edward were respectively the leading centrist and left-wing candidates for the Labour leadership after the 2010 election defeat. (Both are also visibly happier living in the US - this is consistent with my experience of my school/university social circle where secular Jews who had the opportunity mostly moved to the US.) But Orthodox Jews are much higher percentage of the Jewish population, and they are right-wing for the obvious reasons.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9d ago
Straight men having a lot of sex is praiseworthy,
"Rake", "Cad", "Bounder", "Fuckboi" and "Manwhore" are all insults (though not as severe as the equivalent insults for promiscuous women). "Swordsman", "Ladykiller" and "Stud" all imply respect for competence without expressing moral approval or disapproval. The only common term for a successfully promiscuous man that suggests moral approval is "Alpha", and the person who coined the modern usage of the term (Roissy/Heartiste) was entirely comfortable that he was stealing positive moral valence from the older use of "alpha" to refer to a man feared and respected by other men.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
19d ago
It’s not the same people protesting every time.
I'm not directly familiar with US protest culture, but in the UK it so is. Sometimes they forget to change the protest signs and people march against student funding cuts behind a "Free Palestine" banner. We have a single-digit number of activist groups experienced in organising this kind of noisy, disruptive protest, and until the SWP collapsed due to sex scandals most of them were SWP front organisations.
Even if you look at people rather than orgs, we are talking about a subculture (strictly two subcultures because the socialist-anarchist split hasn't gone anywhere) involving a few thousand people split between a small number of big cities (mostly London and Bristol in the UK) which is cohesive to have its own values. The tribal values of the subculture that is socialist protest includes a hierarchy of issues, and Palestine is number 2 on the list after opposing US foreign policy.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
19d ago
The critical point here is the meaning of "lower intelligence". Having IQ 90-100 servants with a good attitude is life-enriching because they do the crapwork so you don't have to. Having IQ 80-90 people in your space is just a problem because they can't even operate a washing machine correctly.
The other problem is that your servants won't retain a good attitude if they are going home to a place dominated by a violent oppositional culture where displaying any sign of servility is putting a target on you.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9d ago
If we only consider women who were indisputably real, I suspect the most famous woman in history would be Queen Elizabeth II.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
"Job in your field" is the wrong metric - there are a lot of jobs which require "any degree" which are clearly graduate-class jobs with the social standing that implies but which are not "in your field" for most of the people doing them. The relevant test is "Job which requires a degree".
The social contract was that university guaranteed a white-collar job and middle-class status, not that it guaranteed that you could follow your dream. Middle managers at Proctor & Gamble (back in the days when that was the typical non-specialist graduate career path) were not chasing a dream, other than the two-car suburban lifestyle.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
19d ago
In a general sense, I think university leftists have done a great job convincing college students that being anti-Israel, pro-Palestine is the default "leftist" "intellectual" position.
I think this is the wrong level of generality to look at it. Someone has convinced the students that the default leftist intellectual alignment is anti-establishment, despite Columbia being an establishment institution that largely exists to train the pro-establishment left. The pro-establishment left has been mostly pro-Israel since the Holocaust and solidly pro-Israel since before I was born. The anti-establishment left has been mostly pro-Palestine since the Nabka and solidly pro-Palestine since kibbutzim stopped being a useful example of really existing socialism. The changing views of leftwing students on Israel-Palestine is downstream of their changing views on the centre-left establishment.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
19d ago
In my experience it could be best stated as there's a subculture of anarchists/communists who basically participate in every left-aligned protest, but many of the protests (particularly bigger ones on popular subjects like anti-austerity or LGBTQ+ rights) will also attract a changing crowd of other, more normie types, which means the anarchist/communist contigent is less notable.
From a UK perspective, the problem is that the SWP crowd have the necessary skills to organise large protests which skirt the boundaries of legality, and the normies don't. So unless the protest is organised by some other group with access to those skills (like a union), it inevitably becomes a SWP-led protest. I became something of a meme in left-wing student circles after I was identified as "the Lib Dem who turned up at a demo in a black cab" - I had 50 protest signs with Lib Dem sympathetic messages to dish out to Lib Dem supporters and a taxi was the only way to get them from the sign printer to the protest in the time available. The SWP had pre-distributed 2 or 3 protest signs each with SWP-sympathetic messages to the 100+ activists they had milling around the start, and lots of non-SWP-supporters ended up carrying because they thought they were just picking up a spare sign from another protestor.
Also the folks who bring Palestine flags to every protest tend to be Middle-Easterners, often actual Palestinians, themselves.
In the 1990s most of the Middle Easterners in the UK were either rich Arabs (who didn't go on protests) or Turkish Cypriots (who don't care about Palestine). The "every demo is about Palestine" dynamic back then was definitely driven by white British lefties. Looking at media coverage, I think that 2024-vintage pro-Palestine protests in the UK are dominated by people from predominantly-Muslim ethnic groups, although I see more South Asians than Middle Easterners.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
This is classic social psych bullshit in a right-wing wrapper. There are two lying-with-statistics tricks going on here:
-
Non-standard terminology. The definition of "elite 1%" excludes the vast majority of elites who live in rich suburbs. They define elite 1% as meeting all 3 of postgraduate degree (this covers 14% of the population), household income over $150k (trivial for a two-income PMC couple in a HCOL city - two schoolteachers with masters degrees would probably qualify) and living in a zip code with a population density over 10k/square mile (only a few % of the population - looking at zipatlas.com these zip codes are mostly downtown districts, prisons and campuses with their own zip codes, NYC, and dense inner suburbs of LA.) So the most restrictive condition is the population density one, which is not a measure of eliteness - it is a proxy for alignment with the tribe Rasmussen wants to bash.
-
Garden of forking paths. The authors switch between "the elite 1%", "elite 1% graduates of a semi-arbitrary list of 12 schools" and "politically obsessed members of the elite 1%" as needed to make the point they are making. We don't know how many other cuts of the data they ran before they chose those ones.
Rasmussen are saying that they have surveyed the elite and found that they are out of touch with America. What they have actually done is surveyed the subset of the PMC that chooses to live in the densest 2% of zip codes, and their interns played with crosstabs until they found some subsets of that group who are, indeed, profoundly out of touch with America. This is about as meaningful as doing some vox pops with stoners in downtown Portland.
See this Arnold Kling post and comments for more details.
I think it’s clear that these are the people with actual power and influence, the ones who set the agenda, the key actors in tech, media, government and law. They create outcomes, or lack thereof. Just about every judge would be elite by this definition, along with nearly all AI workers (OK maybe not the work-from-home guys in the Colorado mountains). All lobbyists, the heads of most NGOs, the most important lawyers – everyone except the right-wing politicians who seem unable to achieve any of their goals.
Apart from Manhattanites, quite the opposite. Who has more power and influence - the residents of DC or the government officials who commute in from the burbs? The people of Anaheim and Inglewood or the people of Beverley Hills? 90210 is by the definition used in this study a non-elite zip code.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Scotland also has an abundance of natural resources and low population density. The SNPs two-faced messaging of "Taking back the North Sea Oil from the thieving English will allow an independent Scotland to have Scandinavian public services with British taxes" and "Independent Scotland will be a green superpower" is darkly amusing.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
Intellectually rigorous humanities study teaches skills which are valuable in the workplace (rapid assimilation of unstructured information, critical evaluation of qualitative arguments, persuasive writing). I learned to write in history class, not by writing lab reports as part of my physics degree, and definitely not from preparing for the compulsory essay questions in the capstone physics paper.
The problem is that humanities courses are the easiest to grade-inflate without it being obvious what you have done, so most students with high GPAs in humanities majors never actually engaged in intellectually rigorous humanities study. Employers will only hire humanities graduates if they are sufficiently clued in to know which are the intellectually rigorous schools and programmes. Harvard philosophy majors are as hireable for a MBB or Wall Street analyst role as the STEMlords.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
12d ago
Jaywalking is okay though. I always joke that the most serious crime I have ever committed was jaywalking in Singapore. Londoners like me jaywalk as routinely as New Yorkers, and it didn't actually cause a problem. (I believe there is technically a S$1000 fine, but it isn't enforced).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
19d ago
Note that the argument that the students are making for "Columbia is profiting from Israel's US backed war in Gaza" is not the sane version of that argument. They are going after Columbia for holding index funds which contain regular American companies which do business in Israel. Apparently Microsoft is "providing surveillance infrastructure to the IDF" and therefore QQQQ is a hate stock. The kind of divestment the students are asking for is not a serious demand that they want met.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
20d ago
Two important roles that universities successfully fulfilled in the past, still could, but don't:
- The Liberal Arts College. Elite formation based on a combination of rigorous study of difficult subjects and directed socialisation with other young elites. The original reason why this stopped happening was grade inflation, but to bring it back you also need to fix wokestupid, and to end the rampant dishonesty about young elites imagining themselves as self-made meritocratic strivers. Potential gains: a more cohesive elite that knows important things and has a stronger sense of noblesse oblige.
- The Research University. The type of curiosity-driven research which is too high-risk for professional (government or corporate) labs without tenure and too remote from practical application for VC-funded startups. Getting this back means fixing publish-or-perish incentives and the PhD overproduction which enables them. Potential gain: the base of pure science that makes spectacular applications low-hanging fruit.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
20d ago
Don't even think about doing a PhD.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
The obvious problem is that boys will ultimately reject the role models given by the school whether fictional or real or other children. Boys want to become men and they have a strong bias against boys or man-babies who are not real men. And this is why they aren’t gravitating to liberal adult male role models (and the boys who will be selected for the program) — they are not anything like a man.
I profoundly disagree with this statement as written, but I suspect this is not a real disagreement. Boys don't want men as role models - they want older boys (edging into young men as they get older), who they perceive as manly. This is based on my experience of being a boy, teaching boys, and being a father of boys. Someone who is more than 10 years older than me is a poor role model for that reason alone (this applies less to historical and public figures whose youth is well-documented - in that case your role model can be the Great Man when he was younger). The institutions which are best at turning boys into men (traditional boys' schools and the military) work on this principle.
The role of man is pretty specific: self-possessed, strong both physically and mentally, responsible, self-confident, a leader, and so on.
All of this is helpful at the margins, but in a healthy male-dominated community, prowess is necessary and sufficient. Boys and young men respect people who are good at something they value. A huge part of the role of the teachers (and particularly the younger teachers who are the right age to be role models to the older boys) at a traditional boys' school is to maintain a culture that values the right things - academics, athletics, fieldcraft (developed through the cadet corps or through adventurous school trips), male-coded fine arts, effective public speaking. Sensitive new-age guys and nerds who were high status in my school included the virtuoso solo cellist in the school orchestra, an internationally competitive fencer, two geniuses who won national competitions in their subjects, and the guy who repaired hi-fi equipment to a professional standard using the school workshop.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Per Wikipedia, Bourdain looks like he was a serially relapsing druggie, which suggests deeper problems he was trying to self-medicate for. He was probably clean when he died, but the police never said what the prescribed medicine found in his system was, and in any case withdrawal is a bitch.
"Hard-living troubled artist" is a lifestyle trope which has a script, including a dramatic premature death. Perhaps Bourdain had always planned to die before he got old, and realised that he was running out of time and needed to take matters into his own hands. If you know why Kurt Cobain killed himself, Anthony Bourdain probably did it for the same reason, plus some semi-conscious desire to copy people like Cobain. The fact that Bourdain was 61 and Cobain was 27 is a comment on rockstardom being an even less healthy culture than celebrity chefdom.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
19d ago
Blocking $26 billion in aid to an extremely wealthy country that also has the wealthiest per capita diaspora community is now anti-semitism?
No, but it is something that rich centrist American Jews care about. There is a reason why AIPAC is as powerful as it is. The sort of Jews who might switch from D to R in response to left-wing campus idiocy are exactly the sort of Jews who support aid to Israel most.
I support third countries getting the feck out of the I-P conflict (my gut feeling is that foreign support for both sides is net escalatory, although I understand the argument that the US paying for Iron Dome specifically is de-escalatory). But I am not American, and my views on this issue are not socially acceptable in elite American social circles. Apart from short-term humanitarian aid while the mess made by the current war is being cleaned up, the only use of donor money in the area I would support is bribing other majority-Muslim countries to take in Palestinian refugees.
I always assumed that putting the Presidential security detail in the Treasury Department (where the Secret Service sat until it was moved into DHS in 2003) was a coup-proofing measure - you wanted the detail to have a totally different reporting line to the military or federal law enforcement. But checking dates suggests that the story might be simpler - the Secret Service took over Presidential security in 1901 (after the McKinley assassination) and the FBI wasn't established until 1908. So at the time they put the detail in the Secret Service, the only civilian alternatives were a new agency, the Marshalls Service, or the Postal Inspectorate. I suspect the Postal Inspectorate would have done a better job.
More options
Context Copy link